As Washington contemplates intervention in Syria, pundits will undoubtedly praise the relatively high-minded debate, one that is not following the usual partisan lines. There's a perennial yearning among Washington's punditocracy to have politicians repudiate "the extremes of left and right" and search for common ground. We hear laments that political leaders are stuck in primary mode, governing on behalf of their base.

This analysis assumes that American politics has an obvious center, in which both sensible policy positions and swing voters may be found. But the more you look for this legendary center, the harder it is to find.

I plead guilty for having succumbed to the lure of the "center." In 2001, I co-authored with Ted Halstead The Radical Center, a book in which we proposed a combination of expanded public funding in many areas with greater individual choice — for example, nationalizing much of K-12 finance in return for a degree of school choice. However, our attempt to propose a "radical center" predicated on a modernized New Deal failed to make the term popular.

If the political "center" today means nothing more than the mathematical midpoint between the policy positions of Democrats and Republicans, then it is a fluid concept, like the center of gravity of the U.S. population, which has moved from Kent County, Maryland in 1790 to Texas County, Missouri, in 2010. By most measures, the Republican party has moved far to the right in the past generation, whereas Democratic positions on most issues have remained stable. So if "the center" is the midpoint between the parties, then the center in 2013 must be well to the right of where it was in 1993.

Some people have attempted to define the political center as a third position — or collection of positions— in American politics between conservatism and liberalism. The problem, as John Judis of The New Republic pointed out back in 1995, is that there are two "centers" in American politics. One is made up of "middle American radicals"— mostly working-class whites, including many so-called "Reagan Democrats" who supported New Deal liberal economic policies but opposed cultural liberalism. The other center is the "moderate middle," often called "liberaltarianism" nowadays, made up mostly of affluent professionals who combine liberalism on social issues with center-right views on economics

Members of both groups were drawn to Ross Perot's Reform Party movement in the 1990s, but in reality their views were diametrically opposite. The Reform party was soon destroyed by an inevitable clash between its populist wing, headed by Patrick Buchanan, and a socially liberal, small-government wing headed by former Colorado governor Richard Lamm.

Today, the class-based gap between the various "centers" has become even more pronounced. Mainstream pundits — many of them members of the one percent, by income — equate "the center" with the liberaltarian worldview: liberal on gay rights and immigration, conservative on taxes and social spending.

But this kind of "centrism" might best be described as "one percentrism." For example, support for cutting Social Security is concentrated among the rich, and eight in ten Americans prefer to raise taxes to pay for Social Security rather than cut benefits. Despite decades of efforts by billionaire conservative Peter G. Peterson and others in favor of deficit/debt reduction, only 7% of the general public think debt reduction is important when compared to more pressing issues like jobs and the weak economy, while 87% of the rich consider it "very important." It is a testament to the distortion of American democracy that when majority views contrast with those of the rich, American politicians of both parties tend to side with those who provide their donations rather than the many who provide their votes.

At this point, the political center has become a will-o-the-wisp, a mirage, that disappears when you approach it. It is so elastic as a term that it's useless. It ought to be abandoned. The related term "centrism" also has little staying power or substance — at least when compared to progressivism, conservatism, libertarianism or socialism. In the words of William Butler Yeats, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation. His most recent book is Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States. He wrote this for Zocalo Public Square.